Beyond the DAC: South-South Cooperation and the New Aid Architecture

The international development horizon has been dominated by the OECD Development Assistance Committee (DAC), which is undergoing a profound structural transformation. Emerging aid providers from non-DAC countries, like China, India, Brazil, and Gulf states, are reshaping the aid architecture and also expanding the alternative paradigms for development finance through the South-South Cooperation (SSC) model. Based on explicit commitments to state sovereignty, non-interference, and mutual economic support, these new actors are challenging the normative frameworks, donor conditionality, and system dominance in the Western-led aid architecture.
The panel seeks to critically evaluate the theoretical and empirical realities of this shifting dynamic in the development aid in contemporary world politics and political economy. Does the expansion of aid donor countries and alternative finance democratize global governance by expanding economic leverage and strategic space for Global South states? Or does it replicate the same older model, which is asymmetric dependencies and debt vulnerabilities, under new geopolitical realities?
Making the case through international political economy, South-South Cooperation, Post-colonial theory and empirical field studies from Asia, Africa, and Latin America, the panel interrogates how non-DAC development aid models alter the state's sovereignty, speed of infrastructure delivery, and its impact on local political economies.